In Rise of ISIS, No Single Missed Key but Many Strands of Blame

By the time the United States withdrew from its long bloody encounter with Iraq in 2011, it thought it had declawed a once fearsome enemy: the Islamic State, which had many names and incarnations but at the time was neither fearsome nor a state.

Beaten back by the American troop surge and Sunni tribal fighters, it was considered such a diminished threat that the bounty the United States put on one of its leaders had dropped from $5 million to $100,000. The group’s new chief was just 38 years old, a nearsighted cleric, not even a fighter, with little of the muscle of his predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the godfather of Iraq’s insurgency, killed by the American military five years earlier after a relentless hunt.

“Where is the Islamic State of Iraq you are talking about?” the Yemeni wife of one leader demanded, according to Iraqi police testimony. “We’re living in the desert!”

Yet now, four years later, the Islamic State is on a very different trajectory. It has wiped clean a 100-year-old colonial border in the Middle East, controlling millions of people in Iraq and Syria. It has overcome its former partner and eventual rival, Al Qaeda, first in battle, then as the world’s pre-eminent jihadist group in reach and recruitment.

It traces its origins both to the terrorist training grounds of Osama bin Laden’s Afghanistan and to America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, and it achieved its resurgence through two single-minded means: control of territory and, by design, unspeakable cruelty.

Its emblems are the black flag and the severed head.

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How has ISIS, a 21st-century terrorist organization with a retrograde religious philosophy, spread from Iraq to Syria, Libya and beyond?

Since last spring the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has been expanding beyond its local struggle to international terrorism. In the last two weeks, it did that in a spectacular way, first claiming responsibility for downing a Russian planeload of 224 people, then sending squads of killers who ended the lives of 43 people in Beirut and 129 in Paris. As the world scrambles to respond, the questions pile up like the dead: Who are they? What do they want? Were signals missed that could have stopped the Islamic State before it became so deadly?

And there were, in fact, more than hints of the group’s plans and potential. A 2012 report by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency was direct: The growing chaos in Syria’s civil war was giving Islamic militants there and in Iraq the space to spread and flourish. The group, it said, could “declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria.”

“This particular report, this was one of those nobody wanted to see,” said Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who ran the defense agency at the time.

“It was disregarded by the White House,” he said. “It was disregarded by other elements in the intelligence community as a one-off report. Frankly, at the White House, it didn’t meet the narrative.”

No report or event can stand in hindsight as the single missed key to the now terrifyingly complex puzzle of the Islamic State. And assigning blame has been part of the political discourse in the United States and beyond: The decision by President George W. Bush and allies to marginalize Iraq’s political and military elite angered and disenfranchised some who formed the heart of the Islamic State. More recently, President Obama and his allies have been criticized as not taking seriously enough the Islamic State’s rise.

Having declared itself a caliphate — the successor to past Islamic empires, ending with the Ottomans — the Islamic State has made Syria and Iraq the central arena for global conflict.

American warplanes and soldiers are once again engaged in the region, along with some from its allies. In an echo of the Cold War, Russia has committed its own planes and missiles, a challenge to the West’s perceived indecision and inaction. Wider struggles in the Middle East, between Iran and Saudi Arabia, between Shiite and Sunni, are also playing out. And fleeing the war and poverty of Syria and Iraq has been a continuous flow of migrants.

“There was a strong belief that brutal insurgencies fail,” said William McCants of the Brookings Institution and a leading expert on the Islamic State, explaining the seeming indifference of American officials to the group’s rise. “The concept was that if you just leave the Islamic State alone, it would destroy itself, and so you didn’t need to do much.”

A Belief in Brutality

There is no evidence that the two central figures in the Islamic State’s ascendance ever met, but a faith in brutality — as a strategy unto itself — was a shared belief. Both came from Iraq, seemingly a key to top leadership in the Islamic State. Otherwise, they could not be more different.

The first, Mr. Zarqawi, a onetime thief, was a tattooed Jordanian and a reformed drinker of extreme personal violence whose own mother had proclaimed him not very smart. The full details of the second, an Iraqi now known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group’s current and reclusive leader, are incomplete, but he is known more as a quiet Sunni cleric, likely with an advanced degree in Islamic studies, whose tribe traces its lineage to the Prophet Muhammad himself. He likes soccer.

Each was shaped by the larger forces of the Islamic world, in particular religious zeal, Al Qaeda and America’s war with Iraq. Each rejected the secular culture of the West, which many say was the target of the attacks in Paris.

As difficult as it might be for Americans after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and more than a decade of thinking of Bin Laden as the basest terrorist planner, Mr. Zarqawi was perhaps more violent and more apocalyptic in his outlook than the Qaeda leader. He grew up poor in the industrial Jordanian city of Zarqa, in a two-story concrete house, with seven sisters and two brothers.

His youth was spent as a petty criminal, but after adopting a strict form of Islam he turned to jihad and traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he actually met with Bin Laden. Al Qaeda, though, was hesitant about letting him join — an early sign of a rivalry that would fester into a final split years later.

While he had a reputation as a thug, Mr. Zarqawi demonstrated keen instincts for strategic thinking. He clearly saw that the United States would invade Iraq, slipping into the country in 2003, by some accounts setting up sleeper cells to attack the invaders. Later, he took full advantage of America’s marginalization of Saddam Hussein’s ruthless Baathist soldiers and bureaucracy.

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An American soldier near rubble in the aftermath of the airstrike that killed Mr. Zarqawi in 2006 north of Baghdad.CreditJoao Silva for The New York Times

Stoking both attacks against American soldiers and tensions with Shiites, he built an insurgency responsible for keystone moments of the early war: assaults on the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, the Shiite Imam Ali Mosque and others large and small.

The United States raised the bounty on him to $25 million, equal to that of Bin Laden. But the videoed decapitations and wanton sectarian killings of Muslim civilians — along with his desire to proclaim an Islamic state — also provoked an unusual rebuke in 2005 from Bin Laden’s No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri (now the top leader of Al Qaeda).

Beheadings, Mr. Zawahri wrote, may stir the passions of “zealous young men” but ordinary Muslims “will never find them palatable.”

An American airstrike finally killed Mr. Zarqawi in June 2006. Four months later, his successors declared the founding of the Islamic State of Iraq. It was one of scores of Sunni groups fighting mostly in northern Iraq, and accounts differ about how effective or distinct it was. Still, Rod Coffey, in March 2008 an American lieutenant colonel, recalls vividly finding the Islamic State’s black, gold-fringed banner some 50 miles north of Baghdad.

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Lt. Col. Rod Coffey with an Islamic State banner his men found in Iraq in 2008.

“These were people who, unlike Bin Laden, said, ‘We are going to control ground now, create a government, create a society, run this place on a steppingstone to creating a caliphate,’” Mr. Coffey, now 54 and retired, recalled.

Near the flag, he found a mass grave of 30 bodies, executed.

‘Jihadi University’

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The image taken from a video released on a militant website shows Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of the Islamic State, delivering a sermon at a mosque in Iraq.Creditvia Associated Press

Mr. McCants, the Brookings scholar, has done deep research into the origins of Mr. Baghdadi, the current leader of the Islamic State, but much remains unclear. In his book “The ISIS Apocalypse,” he traces the rise of a lower-middle class man born in 1971 in the hard-line Sunni city of Samarra, Iraq. His family ties to Saddam Hussein’s army were strong. His own bad eyesight would prevent him from active duty.

Apart from his piety, one fact is not in dispute: Mr. Baghdadi is a former inmate of Camp Bucca, the American prison in southern Iraq now widely agreed to have been crucial in the formation of Iraqi jihadists, housed in proximity behind blast walls and spools of razor wire. It earned names like “the Academy” or the “Jihadi University,” where the United States would unintentionally create the conditions ripe for training a new generation of insurgents.

In “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror,” the authors Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan quote Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone, a prison commander in Iraq: “If you were looking to build an army, prison is the perfect place to do it. We gave them health care, dental, fed them, and most importantly, we kept them from being killed in combat.”

One who spent time there was Hajji Bakr, a former Iraqi colonel nicknamed the “Prince of the Shadows,” who later became Mr. Baghdadi’s second in command. He was killed in 2014 while setting up Islamic State operations in Syria. Mr. Baghdadi himself was imprisoned for 10 months in 2004. He was remembered not as an agitator but as calm and deeply religious, an organizer, good at settling disputes and bringing inmates together.

‘It Grew Quite a Bit’

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Camp Bucca, the American prison in southern Iraq, is widely agreed to have been crucial in the formation of Iraqi jihadists.CreditDavid Furst/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Looking back this week, John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, recounted in a speech to a Washington think tank that the Islamic State was “pretty much decimated when U.S. forces were there in Iraq.”

“It had maybe 700 or so adherents left,” Mr. Brennan said. “And then it grew quite a bit.”

There is little dispute about that initial success. The American military and Sunni tribesmen, banded together in what became known as the Awakening, left Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and other Sunni jihadists in disarray by 2010. In June of that year, Gen. Ray Odierno, leader of the American troops in Iraq, said that “over the last 90 days or so we’ve either picked up or killed 34 of the top 42 Al Qaeda in Iraq leaders,” using one early name for the Islamic State.

Americans wanted to believe that the Iraq war had ended in triumph, and the troops were soon withdrawn. But almost immediately tensions began rising between the Sunnis and the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki — supported by the United States and Iran, the Shiite giant to the east. Salaries and jobs promised to cooperating tribes were not paid. There seemed little room for Sunnis in the new Iraq. The old Sunni insurgents began to look appealing again.

“The Sunnis were just trying to survive,” recalled Col. Kurt Pinkerton, who was an American battalion commander in Iraq at the time. “It was more about survival and assimilation.”

Mr. Baghdadi was named head of the Islamic State in 2010, and his group seemed particularly adept at exploiting these fears. Mr. McCants recounts how they entered a period of concentrated “reflection,” developing a detailed, militarily precise plan for resurrection in 2009.

The document, parts of which are translated in Mr. McCants’s book, is strikingly self-critical, acknowledging that the Islamic State had lost some of its aggressiveness and did not control territory. It advised adopting the American tactic of co-opting the Sunni tribes, conceding that recruiting “the tribes to eliminate the mujahadis was a clever, bold idea.”

The document also makes clear the need for a media strategy — a recommendation the group went on to follow with great success, exploiting social media to spread its message and to attract recruits, many in the more technologically savvy West.

A Promising New Front

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Free Syrian Army fighters on the outskirts of Damascus in January 2012, during the early stages of the war against President Bashar al-Assad.CreditTomas Munita for The New York Times

Then a civil war broke out in Syria — a new and promising front for the Islamic State’s ambitions.

Protests erupted against the government of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, in 2011 amid the wider Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere. The world struggled with how to help — with a weary America unenthusiastic about engaging anymore — and after a brutal crackdown by government forces, Syrian protest groups morphed into fighters. At first many were army defectors and locals, focused on defending their communities and overthrowing Mr. Assad. But because foreign fighters, some steeped in extremist ideologies, often proved to be the best organized and funded, they gained momentum on the battlefield.

One distinguishing trait of the Islamic State, as opposed to other groups like the Nusra Front and the smaller, more secular groups calling themselves the Free Syrian Army, was its focus on establishing the structures and trappings of a state and giving that priority over battling Syrian government forces. (This has led to widespread belief of a secret truce between Mr. Assad and the Islamic State, given credence recently when the group was left off the list of first targets when Russia intervened to shore up Mr. Assad.)

As the Islamic State established itself – at first not just in Raqqa and eastern Aleppo Province and much of Deir al-Zour, but also in villages and outposts scattered in Idlib and western Aleppo — its fighters drew curiosity, attention and sometimes ridicule for their presumption. They put up road signs at the beginnings of territory they held saying, “Welcome to the Islamic State.”

Early on, the Islamic State’s rivals underestimated it, only to face deadly attacks from the group later. They were not the only ones — Mr. Obama likened the group to the “J.V. team.” And the Islamic State fighters often did seem like buffoons, especially the foreign ones, who came from across the Middle East, Central Asia and Europe. Many could not speak Arabic. And some barely knew anything of Islamic theology. They posted on social media pictures of themselves mugging for the camera as they swam in the Euphrates River, or complaining that it was difficult to find Nutella in the shops.

But some were serious, determined and ideologically motivated. “I have chosen the state,” one man who identified himself as a Saudi fighter said in an online interview, explaining that his interest was less in overthrowing Mr. Assad than in striving for a caliphate, “because I support its method of unification and implementation of the Shariah of God.”

The Islamic State did, in fact, succeed in building the semblance of a state, providing services as well as imposing the harshest of rules. It worked to self-finance, through oil, trade in priceless antiquities and, many say, simple criminal enterprises like kidnapping and extortion.

And, as it always promised, the Islamic State was brutal, frightening fellow groups and the wider world with practices like sexual slavery, immolations, crucifixions and beheadings. Those included well-produced killings on video, and spread through social media, of the journalist James Foley and others, ending often with a shot of a bloody severed head.

A Caliphate Declared

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Islamic State fighters in Mosul last year parading in a vehicle commandeered from Iraqi security forces.CreditAssociated Press

The climax of the Islamic State’s rise came in June 2014, when it routed the Iraqi military police and captured Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, erasing the century-old border between Iraq and Syria established after World War I. The caliphate had been declared the month before, but soon after Mosul’s capture, Mr. Bagdhadi, in a black S.U.V., arrived at the Nuri Mosque in Mosul in a rare appearance to make that state formal.

Wearing a black turban signifying his descent from Muhammad, he said: “God, blessed and exalted, has bestowed victory and conquest upon your mujahid brothers.”

“They rushed to announce the caliphate and appoint a leader,” he said. “This is a duty incumbent on Muslims, which had been absent for centuries and lost from the face of the earth.”

There was another victory, which had played out behind the scenes in bitter missives between Al Qaeda central, the Islamic State and its Qaeda-sponsored affiliate, the Nusra Front. Mr. Baghdadi rejected demands from Mr. Zawahri, leader of Al Qaeda after Bin Laden’s death, that he step in line under his rule. No, Mr. Baghdadi said: The Islamic State was supreme and separate. Al Qaeda central had become, in some sense, the cautious, increasingly irrelevant uncle. Paris was the proof of that.

Experts Divided

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Paramedics treating a victim of the terrorist assault outside the Bataclan concert hall in Paris last Friday.CreditPierre Terdjman for The New York Times

The carnage of the French capital — young Parisians gunned down by suicide commandos — has intensified the fears and soul-searching of the West.

What was missed, and what can be done?

America has been bombing the Islamic State for over a year. Russia has joined the fight, for its own murky reasons. France has begun a new round of airstrikes of uncertain effectiveness.

At United States Central Command — the military headquarters based in Tampa, Fla., that is in charge of the American air campaign — intelligence analysts have long bristled at what they see as deliberate attempts by their bosses to paint an overly optimistic picture of the war’s progress.

A group of seasoned Iraq analysts saw the conflict as basically a stalemate, and became enraged when they believed that senior military officers were changing their conclusions in official Central Command estimates in order to emphasize that the bombing campaign was having positive effects. The group of analysts brought their concerns to the Defense Department’s inspector general, who began an investigation into the complaints.

Similar worries were echoed outside the military. “The Americans have been bombing targets in Syria for 14 months and that didn’t stop the horrible attacks in Paris,” said Robert S. Ford, a former American ambassador to Syria and now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “I’m not saying bombing attacks are useless, and they probably have some limited value. But we have to know this is not a long-term solution.”

Only a political solution that finally incorporates Sunnis into Iraq, he said, will work.

Even in the weeks before the Paris attacks, intelligence analysts were also deeply divided over the future of the Islamic State’s terrorism campaign. Some believed that the group was content to keep a local focus — consolidating the “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria, urging followers around the world to launch small-scale attacks, but eschewing the centrally planned “spectacular” attacks that had long been Al Qaeda’s strategy.

But other intelligence analysts were less certain, arguing that it was only a matter of time before the Islamic State turned to attacks against Europe or the United States that would grab headlines and sow fear in Western capitals.

Last Friday, it seems, the answer to this debate revealed itself, though to what end is unknown. Some experts wonder if the Islamic State has moved to complete its apocalyptic vision in a final battle with the forces of what it calls Rome, or the West.

A Move Too Far?

The question for the Islamic State, after years of expansion and success on its terms, even evidence of using mustard agent, is whether Paris proved one move too far — a brutality the world will not tolerate.

The group has already been under pressure from several angles: Aerial attacks have in fact damaged its moneymaking oil infrastructure.

After losing the symbolic prize of Kobani last year in northeastern Syria, and the Iraqi city of Tikrit in the spring, it has more recently lost large stretches of crucial Syrian territory along the Turkish border to Kurdish fighters backed by American airstrikes.

The organization has lately shown signs of strain, according to residents of Raqqa and family members who have fled the area but keep in contact with them. It is trying to press-gang boys as young as 15 or 16 into fighting the Kurds. It is shutting down more and more Internet cafes, seeking to control the flow of information. It has even resorted to hectoring, plaintive advertisements on social media, showing pictures of Syrian refugees packed into boats bound for Europe and excoriating them for fleeing to the lands of “the infidels.”

And while many of those refugees are fleeing the government’s and other combatants, many others have indeed come from “the state” — and are voting against life there with their feet, a powerful indictment of the caliphate’s promise to create utopia for Muslims from around the world. Though here again, there seems evidence that the Islamic State may be taking perverse advantage, perhaps sending trained fighters back into Europe with the innocents.

Like any organization that expands quickly then faces setbacks, it has internal tensions.

Some complain that it is controlled by Iraqis who see Syria as a convenient province. There are reports of dozens of executions and imprisonments of Islamic State fighters trying to flee the group. There are complaints about salaries and living conditions, disputes over money and business opportunities, allegations that commanders have absconded with looted cash and other resources.

And there is growing anecdotal evidence that even some members of the group — particularly locals who may have joined out of opportunism or a sense that it was the best way to survive — have become disgusted, like the larger world, by its extreme violence.

“I still feel sick,” Abu Khadija, a Syrian fighter for the Islamic State, said recently after witnessing the beheadings of dozens of war prisoners near the Syrian-Iraqi border.

“I can’t eat, I feel I want to throw up,” he said. “ I hate myself.”

Correction:

An article on Nov. 19 about the many missed clues to the rise of the Islamic State misstated, in some editions, the year that the United States withdrew from Iraq. It was 2011, not 2010.

Ian Fisher covered Iraq regularly in 2003 and 2004 and returned on reporting trips several times thereafter.